FM looks into and beyond Vietnam protests to a storied culture of rebellion on campus challenging everything from saturated fats to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 1766—one hundred and thirty years after its founding—Harvard hosted the first recorded student protest in American history: a protest against butter. For decades, the quality of food in the College’s dining halls had been sharply declining. The student’s complaints about the food and particularly about the sourness of the butter fell lamely upon the ears of the College president, Edward Holyoke, Class of 1705.

So, on September 23, Asa Dunbar of the Class of 1767—the grandfather of Henry David Thoreau—mounted his chair and proclaimed: “Behold, our butter stinketh!—Give us, therefore, butter that stinketh not.” The majority of the student body heartily accepted this as their motto and echoed it over the course of the next month as the protests of the Great Butter Rebellion ensued.

In a fit of displeasure, President Holyoke demanded that the students turn in the instigators of the protest—along with Dunbar, the rabble-rousers included the entirety of the “Sons of Harvard,” a student offshoot of the “Sons of Liberty.” Since no student confessed, President Holyoke decided to suspend over half of the student body in hopes that someone would fess up. But again the students maintained their solidarity and said nothing.

Eventually the Board of Overseers stepped in, readmitting the suspended students and replacing the butter. Yet two years later, the dining hall food worsened again and the protests resumed with more aggression and fewer returns.

Following the Great Butter Rebellion, culinary remonstrations became a central component of Harvard’s protest culture, from the Bread and Butter Rebellion of 1805 through the Cabbage Rebellion of 1807 to the “Rebelliad” insurrection of 1819.

II. LIFE, LIBERTY, AND CABBAGE

The Cabbage Rebellion began after maggots kept showing up in the student’s cabbage soup. The disgruntled vegetable enthusiasts assembled under a tree at the end of Hollis Hall, which would later be called “Rebellion Elm.” The bedraggled students supplicated for better food, but following the suspension of 17 students, the unavailing protest ended in vain.

In 1819 a new generation of students returned to “Rebellion Elm” to make their own demands. Fed up with being poorly fed, the entire sophomore class dropped out of Harvard in the hope that doing so would spur some indignation among the administration. It didn’t and the defected students had to ask to be readmitted; only some were allowed.

These events would later be recounted as a parody epic poem of four cantos entitled “Rebelliad; or Terrible Transactions at the Seat of the Muses.” The poem was privately published and widely distributed among students. The conclusion to the prologue of the poem reads: